Description
Giulia Tettamanti, “Silvestro Ganassi and the Valente Master (1542–43): Forging a Model of the Perfect Player” (pdf). Early Music Performance & Research, no. 54 (autumn 2024): 11-30.
Silvestro Ganassi is widely recognized today for writing the most important book in the history of the recorder and the first treatise about diminutions, Opera Intitulata Fontegara (Venice, 1535). He also wrote a two-volume treatise on the viol, Regola Rubertina (1542) and Lettione Seconda (1543), the latter also containing information on the lute. But Ganassi was far more than just a player, being known to his peers also as a good painter and a virtuous man with a “divine” intellect. On the title page of Lettione Seconda, he promises besides several technical skills to reveal all the secrets that can make one into a valente master on the viol and lute. This article explores the philosophical background of this promise, showing what valente implied as well as why and how he provides his own overview of the perfect player according to rhetorical ideals.
